The irony of this is that men and women are relatively similar to each other in terms of ski jumping performance. The gender disparity that exists in some other sports doesn't in exist ski jumping.

Let's use this season's World Cup event in Lillehammer as an example.

The men and women both jumped on the same hill on the same day in the same conditions.

The men, on average, were slightly better than women in both the distance metric and the style metric. But the difference is so small as to make the two groups fairly comparable. In addition, several female jumpers outscored the majority of male jumpers.

Sara Takanashi, a 17-year-old from Japan who's the gold medal favorite in Sochi, would have won the silver medal in the men's competition in Lillehammer on Dec. 7. Her combined score of 286.0 was only 2.5 points behind Gregor Schlierenzauer, who won the event with a score of 288.5.

Here are the top-15 finishers on the day, regardless of gender (women in bold):

Gregor Schlierenzauer, 288.5 points

Sara Takanashi, 286.0 points

Taku Takeuchi, 283.5 points

Richard Freitag, 280.3 points

Anders Bardal, 277.1 points

Maciej Kot, 276.9 points

Andreas Wellinger, 276.2 points

Severin Freund, 272.9 points

Robert Kranjec, 271.3 points

Rune Velta, 270.8 points

Daniela Iraschko-Stolz, 270.0 points

Gianina Ernst, 270,0 points

Carina Vogt, 269.3 points

Noriaki Kasai, 268.8 points

Jacqueline Seifriedsberger, 268.1 points

It's rare for men and women to compete in World Cup events on the same hill on the same day. So the sample size is far from complete. But based on this one event, men and women are essentially on the same level.

Interesting, the men and women will both compete on the normal hill in Sochi, which should give us another set of data to compare.

So why doesn't gender matter in ski jumping?

In short, weight is an important factor when it comes to ski jumping. As a general rule, the lighter the jumper, the better.

Weight isn't the only thing that matters in ski jumping, though. Or else, the lightest person would win every time.

Wolfam Muller of the University of Graz wrote in a 2005 paper on the sport. In it, he argued that maintaining an aerodrymaic flight position is an art:

"The field study conducted during the Olympic Games competitions 2002 at Park City (elevation: 2000 m) showed an impressive ability of the Olympic medallists to reproduce their flight style and remarkable differences between different athletes have been found. The aerodynamic forces are proportional to the air density. Elite athletes are able to adapt their flight style to thin air conditions in order to maximise jump length and to keep the flight stable."

In other words, ski jumpers have skills. While all ski jumps look the same to an untrained eye, there's actually a ton of stuff going on every time an athlete takes off.

Weight matters, but so does technique.

So while weight might be an advantage for some athletes in ski jumping, it means nothing without the skills to parlay that advantage into results.